Errors made by Healthcare.gov can’t be fixed in Healthcare.gov

posted at 8:41 am on February 3, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Consumers who attempted to enroll in health insurance through the ObamaCare web portal but had errors introduced into their applications cannot get them fixed, the Washington Post reports this morning. More than 22,000 people can’t get their enrollments properly completed, because HHS still hasn’t built that part of the system — and many of these won’t get insured for the near term because of it, or are paying too much for the coverage the system assigned to them:

“It is definitely frustrating and not fair,” said Addie Wilson, 27, who lives in Fairmont, W.Va., and earns $22,000 a year working with at-risk families. She said that she is paying $100 a month more than she should for her insurance and that her deductible is $4,000 too high.

When Wilson logged on to HealthCare.gov in late December, she needed coverage right away. Her old insurance was ending, and she was to have gallbladder surgery in January. But the Web site would not calculate the federal subsidy to which she knew she was entitled. Terrified to go without coverage, Wilson phoned a federal call center and took the advice she was given: Pay the full price now and appeal later.

Now she is stuck.

“I hope,” she said, “they really work on getting this fixed.”

The deadline for April 1 enrollment — the date by which all Americans must be covered — is rapidly approaching. Traditionally, it takes about six weeks to enroll, but the Obama administration has pushed insurers into a much narrower processing time. Even if it could wait as long as mid-March, we’re only five or six weeks away from that date. How close is this system from coming on line?

Er ….

But at the moment, “there is no indication that infrastructure . . . necessary for conducting informal reviews and fair hearings has even been created, let alone become operational,” attorneys at the National Health Law Program said in a late-December letter to leaders of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that oversees HealthCare.gov. The attorneys, who have been trying to exert leverage quietly behind the scenes, did not provide the letter to The Post but confirmed that they had sent it.

Don’t forget that we’re still waiting for the back-end payment systems to come on line, too. Earlier this month, HHS finally fired CGI Federal and hired a new contractor, Accenture. That means that Accenture has to come up to speed on all of the broken and missing parts of Healthcare.gov before they can proceed in fixing it. They’re getting $90 million to do so, but even all that money won’t speed the process up appreciably.

Wilson had to have surgery to remove a gangrenous gallbladder, and stayed in the hospital five days. She tried calling the appeals team, only to be told that the mistakes made by the system have no way of getting corrected within that system. “These little kinks should have been worked out prior to this thing being launched,” she told the Post’s Amy Goldstein.

Perhaps HHS should have skipped the whole launch until it had a whole system. We’ve seen a lot more than “little kinks” in ObamaCare.

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Addie Wilson, 27, who lives in Fairmont, W.Va., and earns $22,000 a year working with at-risk families.

See? There’s her first mistake. She should stay home and collect a paycheck from the gov’mint. She would make more that way.

She said that she is paying $100 a month more than she should for her insurance and that her deductible is $4,000 too high.

That’s a feature not a bug.

Wilson phoned a federal call center and took the advice she was given: Pay the full price now and appeal later.

Now she is stuck.

:::SHOCKED:::

Accenture has to come up to speed on all of the broken and missing parts of Healthcare.gov before they can proceed in fixing it. They’re getting $90 million to do so, but even all that money won’t speed the process up appreciably.

That’s the bad news. The good news (for Accenture) is that they can screw up royally, get fired replaced, and collect a $90 million paycheck.

Now wait just a second. You can’t go making a bunch of changes midstream. We have to let this system sort itself out. Would you stop a bleeding wound? would you put water on a house fire? Of course not!

And what’s really sad is that all this won’t make a damned bit of difference in the end. Misguided and uninformed voters will turn a blind eye to all this crap and continue to vote in the fascists that brought this awful program into being.

She needed a health plan because her employer, the organization Home Base, was cutting off the Blue Cross-Blue Shield coverage she and her co-workers had, reasoning that they could find better choices on the new marketplace.

All of the perpetrators of this disaster- Obama, Reid, Pelosi, their fellow Democrats in Congress and all of their staffs- are still in office, merrily luxuriating in all the benefits thereof, arrogantly confident of their invincibility.

When asked about the roll out on the O’Reilly interview, Obama claimed that yes, there were some initial glitches, but everything is fine now…And he said this with a straight face…Obama straight face = lying his a$$ off.

Like PSH’s death, not a big surprise. I’ve been trying to clear up a claim with Medicare for my mom that was mistakingly denied back in September. I’ve been bounced between Medicare and SS and back again. No one can change the inaccurate data. They can barely say that it is wrong. The government speak that the reps use is not only meant to be evasive, it is downright frightening.

I think it’s going to take incidents like this to bring the Trojan horse down on its knees. Hoping this thing collapses sooner rather than later. Why is it that Zero’s focus is now on income inequality rather than fixing this?

At least for several weeks, those who signed up through MNSure and were deemed eligible for Medical Assistance (MedicAid) were sent managed care membership cards before year-end. They say “Valid January 2014″ None of them worked. There were many who had their MA numbers on file with us from previous coverage. On a whim, after 15 agonizing minutes of these numbers not working for one couple, I ran their old MA numbers. These give taxpayer dollars directly to providers, and are not insurance.

They worked.

The workaround, apparently unannounced, was MedicAid being activated and charging taxpayers directly while they try to make their Potemkin cards work. The pharmacy patients did not get that their “active” cards weren’t.

Ms. Wilson as sorry as I am to read about your problem, as far as the politics goes, I don’t think you count.

It was a controversial program to begin with which meant that external events, such as elections, influenced how the program was or was not displayed to the public. Since it was likely assumed it would never be repealed, the most important factor was to not let it give the political opposition ammunition to perhaps get enough votes to force a repeal.

So things that any business would take seriously — website does not work, back-end systems nonexistent, coordination between necessary components not good, security problematic, etc. — became secondary to keeping those problems quiet and reassuring everyone that it was all on track up until it actually launched and all the problems start to manifest themselves. The point where the rubber meets the road.

Now three plus years after passage, with the crisis and chaos now obvious to all and undeniable, they are trying to fix what should have been incrementally tested over the prior three years.

The system overall, not just PPACA, is in flux. New realities, not assumptions, have to play out. The ground is shifting under everyone’s feet. Until this all works itself out through the system, things will remain unsettled and uncertain.